Theoretically the reason for this is prevent meth heads from stealing IDs, of course one has to wonder why 1.8 million people's images (and ultimately everyone holding a driver's license or even an ID card in the state of Oregon) is necessary to be enrolled into the program. While theoretically the database is only for ODOT purposes, law enforcement has access to the system.

Once this technology gets used in other states (and in federal jurisdictions), and I'm sure it has been already, it will be possible for a person's face to picked out of a crowd and matched against a digital database. Of course we are told this is all for our own security. I wonder. When I saw the police action on November 17, an amazing display of force, by the way, they had a poll camera taking pictures of the people. It seems to me not unreasonable to suspect that these images could be matched, at least in part, against the state's DMV database.

I fully expect to see a system implemented in airports and other transportation terminals, maybe even on freeway overpasses, that will capture images of people and instantly match them to a DMV database, and it might even become a matter of suspicion, and grounds (legal or not, it doesn't matter) for inquiry if one's face does not trigger a match in the database. When you add in potential automated searches of Facebook, etc. for digital image recognition, the power of such an application becomes enormous.

By the way, of course there's a corporate and lobbying link to all of this. Per the linked article above from salem-news.com:

One local company stood to be a winner from the state law. Digimarc, a Beaverton-based security company, secured contracts with many states before selling its I.D. business to L-1 Identity Solutions for $310 million in 2008.Digimarc lobbied for the Oregon law and was later awarded the no-bid contract to implement it. In Oregon, Digimarc not only won the biometric processing contract but I.D.-making services as a whole. Between L-1 and former Digimarc, Oregon has paid the company $3.1 million since 2009.

A number of states have been implementing the technology to meet the requirements of the Department of Homeland SecurityReal ID Act, which sets minimum standards for state issued identification cards, including proof of indentify.Since taking over the Digimarc facial recognition business, L-1 has landed contracts with about 40 states, some worth upwards of $60 million, and the U.S. Department of State for passports, a $195 million contract.

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Note the "no bid" contract, typical of the security state. Also, when you go to, for example, the FBI biometric center, they talk about "privacy" rather than the right to be free unreasonable searches and seizures. Once the idea of "privacy" takes root, it becomes easy to blow off violations as a matter of excess prudishness of the governed. TSA is well known for this sort of rubbish.

Yep, and it's coming soon. There won't be an national database of DL pix, there won't need to be. The 50 or so databases will all be searched by way of a chain of queries for a match to a face. I suspect that merely walking into an airport, or perhaps driving into the terminal zone will trigger this inquiry and it will be automatic.